In our family, from the time they started school, we have always told our daughters that we don’t care about their grades; what we care about is that they focus on lessons learned and put in their best effort. It sounds cliche, but my husband and I both meant it. However, as is often the case in traditional public schooling, the emphasis on grading and test scores has been prevalent since kindergarten. Therefore, our daughters always rolled their eyes growing up when we would state our line again about focusing on what they were learning and their level of effort.
I believe that emphasis on grades, scores, and comparison against others that is ingrained in us from a young age contributes to the fear in adults to embrace the idea of “learning-sized mistakes” that Jim Collins talks about in Choosing to be Great.
Our team has been operating by following Agile values for ten years, so the phrase “learning-sized mistakes” felt like a perfect way to raise the subject within our own team recently. I asked the team in our chat tool, “What does the phrase learning-sized mistakes” mean to you in the context of your work in our team?
“My mind immediately thinks of a situation where you take that mistake, break it down, and grow from it to create ways of not making that mistake again.” – Megan Martin, Marketing & Training Product Owner
“When I see the phrase, I think of it as reframing ‘big’ mistakes into something that could improve how your team works. Instead of looking at it as a ‘big’ problem that happened.” – Beth Archer, Writing Team Scrum Master and Lead Writer
I love that Laura Macaluso, a Lead Writer with our team, plugged the question into ChatGPT to help give an opaque phrase a more specific definition. ChatGPT shared that “‘learning-sized mistakes’ refers to errors that are small or manageable enough to serve as valuable learning experiences without causing serious consequences.”
The reality is that everyone on our team is proud of their work—whether their work is writing highly competitive grant applications, working with partners to set up and produce high-quality grant writing training, delivering Agile training to nonprofits that regularly scores 100 as a Net Promoter Score, or copy editing the large volume of written and training material that our team produces each week. Before I posed my question about learning-sized mistakes, I felt confident that no one on the team LIKES making mistakes of any kind. Yet, as a team that is focused on continuous improvement, sets individual professional development goals each year, and has a dedicated budget for each employee to meet those goals, it feels like the discussion about learning-sized mistakes should have a place in the team as well.
What the examination and discussion of this phrase brought up for me were a few things:
1 – How can we create a psychologically safe work environment where making learning-sized mistakes is not only okay but also celebrated and openly discussed?
2 – Usually, our team focuses on learning from our successes and thinking about how to create that success again by looking for repeatable patterns/approaches that bring that success. Where do learning-sized mistakes fit into that approach?
3 – How do you institutionalize the knowledge gained by learning-sized mistakes to potentially prevent a future new team member who hasn’t experienced the lessons from the learning-sized mistake firsthand from having to repeat previous team mistakes?
What does the phrase “learning-sized mistakes” bring up for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts—leave a note in the comments, or reach out via email diane @dhleonardconsulting.com.